


Life and Death

by justlikenart



Category: Original Work
Genre: Child Death, Child Neglect, Gen, Mental Health Issues, Poverty, kindness of strangers, parental neglect, parentified sibling
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-18
Updated: 2019-10-18
Packaged: 2020-12-23 18:03:52
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,039
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21085553
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/justlikenart/pseuds/justlikenart
Summary: A man has a run in with a teenage boy at a gas station. The more he learns about the boy and his family, the more dire he feels their situation is. But he's made a promise and he's not leaving until something changes.He may not be the father they've clearly been looking for, but he's the next best thing.





	Life and Death

**Author's Note:**

> Sorry I'm not to good at summarizing my work. Maybe I'll come up with a better one later.
> 
> Also this version isn't edited at all because. Well this is ao3 not something with value or stakes. Maybe I'll edit it later. See a theme here?
> 
> Based on a very odd dream I had. All resemblances to real persons, alive or dead, is pure coincidence. In the dream, the characters were all the family from Bob's Burgers but that is not how I want you to picture this. Why am I bringing it up then? Great question.

The door opens with a pleasant sound. A man, tall enough to need to duck through the opening, entered the store.

It was one of those gas station stores, run down and dusty. The station itself had only one pump, and one employee ran the store and the pump. It had a decrepit appearance, and the man got the distinct impression that he was the only visitor the store had seen in some time.

The employee was reading a magazine and didn’t look up at the sound of the bell. She didn’t move, even when the man walked up to the counter she sat at and cleared his throat.

“Um,” the man began, and the beleaguered employee looked up with a bored, uncaring expression on her face. 

“How can I help you?” She asked, sounding like she would like nothing better than for the man to leave her store and never return. She didn’t even glance up from her magazine. 

He blinked. “I’m sorry to inconvenience you,” he said, but inwardly he was a little annoyed. This was her job, wasn’t it? All he was doing was asking someone for a little help. He could do without the clear disregard. “My car broke down something like ten miles south of here, I was wondering if you- if you knew a good number I could call to rent a replacement, or maybe a roadside mechanic or something like that?” 

She flipped the page. “Nah,” she said. He waited for a moment, but it seemed she was done talking to him.

“Do you have a yellow pages I could look at?” the man tried again.

“No.”

“Do you have a phone I could borrow?”

“No.”

He sighed, frustrated. “Do you have anything?”

She finally looked up at him. “We have gas. And whatever crap you see on the shelves. Are you as dumb as you look?”

Tired of the extremely unhelpful gas station employee, he gave up and turned away. In his pocket he had about thirty dollars of cash, and he figured he’d buy some water and some food and continue his trek in the hopes of finding someone more helpful.

He perused the shelves, noting that many of them were simply empty. There was a case of water bottles for sale, but nothing else. He didn’t want to buy a whole case, so he sighed again and looked for anything else to drink.

He settled on a lukewarm bottle of coca cola and a couple of bags of pretzels. The employee was back to reading her magazine, and spared him and his purchases only the most cursory of looks. 

“Six seventy nine,” she told him. He thought that was awfully expensive, but he figured the store could use it and handed over a ten dollar bill. She looked at it, then looked at him. 

“We don’t have change,” she told him. “Are you sure you want to pay with that?”

The man groaned, and then went back to the shelves to grab some more food to bring him at least close to ten dollars. He chose another bottle of soda (Sprite this time) and a chocolate bar.

“Nine fourty three,” she told him, and he handed over his ten.

She handed him a cigarette. “That’s your change,” she told him.

He was oddly touched by that, even though he didn’t smoke. He reconsidered his dislike of her. He considered giving it back, but then decided to accept it just because of the symbol it represented. “Thank you,” he told her.

He pulled the door open, the bell tinkling once again.

As he did, he was met with another person. A young man, maybe about nineteen or twenty, had been reaching for the door. It swung out and struck him in the face.

The man apologized profusely, feeling extremely guilty. 

The younger man reached a hand up to his nose. He looked tired, like he just couldn’t seem to care. “It’s alright,” he said. 

The man hated listening to him talk. He sounded hopeless, exhausted. The world had clearly not been kind to this particular youth. He hated the knowledge that he was now included in that group.

“Can I help you with anything?” he asked, desperate to somehow repay the poor young man.

He looked at him shrewdly. “Yeah,” he said. “I’m here to buy groceries for my family. You can give me a ride back to our house.”

The older man rubbed the back of his neck sheepishly. “I’m sorry. My car broke down about ten miles down the road. Can I help you carry them back?”

The youth shrugged. “If you want.”

They said no more to each other. The older man watched as the young man picked up the healthiest foods he could find. Browning fruits, some bottles of juice. Chips and beef jerky, and a couple bags of gummy candy. He seemed satisfied, and went to grab the case of water the older man had initially passed over. He carefully stacked all his other stuff on the case, and then brought it over to the employee.

She put down her magazine and smiled thinly at the youth. “The usual?” she asked. 

He nodded. “Thank you, Claire,” he said. “I really appreciate you doing this for us.”

“No problem,” she told him. “Tell Avery I said hello.”

So the youth was a regular. The man was touched at the sight of whatever this was. He quietly berated himself for judging the young lady before. 

He noticed that the boy didn’t hand over any money. He waited for him to look away and then handed Claire the rest of his money.

She looked down at it, and then at him. “His family has a tab,” she explained. 

“Then I’m paying some of it off,” he said. 

She smiled at him, and he found himself thinking that she had a rather nice smile. “You got it, mister,” she said, and put his twenty dollars in her cash register. 

The younger man had seen it, but didn’t say anything. He just watched, then heaved the case of water over his shoulder. “You can get the other stuff,” he said shortly, then turned and walked out the door.

The bell rang as the two men left.

They walked in silence for a long while. The man let the youth carry the case for about fifteen minutes of the walk before he said, “I can take that for you, if you’d like.”

He shrugged and then set the case down. “Okay.”

The water was heavy, but the man would rather shoulder that burden than force it on the youth.

After fifteen more minutes the man’s shoulders and back were screaming in pain. He gritted his teeth and decided to try and spark a conversation with the kid just to take his mind off the pain he was currently in.

“So, what’s your name?” he asked.

“Leon,” said the youth. Nothing else.

“That’s a fine name,” he said. “Mine’s Robert. Pretty basic. Definitely not as interesting as Leon.”

From Leon’s long silence the entire half an hour walk, Robert wasn’t expecting any more engagement. But Leon surprised him.

“It’s fine. That was my dad’s name.”

Robert smiled. “Oh yeah? Your grandparents had good taste, then.”

Leon huffed a laugh under his breath. Robert silently cheered. It was a victory.

Then Leon spoke again. “My dad died a while ago,” he said, and Robert’s heart broke a little when he said it in the same matter of fact tone he’d said everything else. 

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Robert told him.

“It’s okay,” said Leon.

Robert’s heart broke again and he decided to try again. “It doesn’t have to be. It sucks that your dad died.”

Leon paused. “...Yeah. Thank you.”

He figured that was as far as he would get with the young man on this particular topic, but considered it a victory anyway. 

“How’s your mother?” he asked. “She still in the picture?”

Leon didn’t answer for a long moment. “She’s still in the picture,” he said carefully. Robert did notice he avoided completely answering the question. He didn’t want to push Leon, however, so he let it go.

“You got any siblings?”

Leon nodded. “Yeah. I’m the oldest. I have two sisters and tw- and a brother.”

“What are their names?” Robert asked.

“Why?”

That was a weird response. Robert backed up. “You don’t have to answer. I’m just trying to make small talk to distract from how heavy this water is.”

Leon laughed. “Ha, I do appreciate the honesty.” He took a deep breath. “Well, my sisters’ names are Avery and Nikola, and my brother’s name is Maximus.”

“Your parents picked some good names,” he said. He genuinely thought that. They were all pretty cool names, in his opinion.

Leon smiled thinly. “Yeah, I guess.”

He kept up, asking Leon about his goals and life. He learned that Leon was actually only eighteen, that he was currently a senior in high school. He was good at math and good at the piano, although he didn’t have any way to practise. He wanted to go to college for an engineering degree, and was hoping to get a music scholarship to be able to afford tuition. He was working at a fast food place in the small town near his high school to be able to support his siblings and mother.

He learned that Leon and his siblings had to walk forty minutes each way to get to their school, that they couldn’t afford a car since their dad had died. He learned that they had a tab at the store because Leon simply didn’t make enough to also pay for the scant groceries available there. The family lived off that and whatever Leon could scavenge from his place of work.

He learned little about Leon’s mother, only that she couldn’t work and left most of the childcare up to Leon. His youngest sibling, Maximus, was only three. Leon had raised him pretty much from infancy.

Leon seemed open to talking about all of his family, except his mother and Maximus. Robert thought that was odd, but didn’t comment.

Instead, he had a crazy idea. He was stranded here anyway, and wasn’t due to be back at his job for another couple of days. He had a credit card in his wallet. He didn’t have a cell phone, but he figured he could maybe get a job in town and just try to help this family out a little.

He didn’t know why, but he felt drawn to them. He heard a little voice in his head, telling him that this boy needed him.

And he didn’t know why, but he listened to it. 

“Hey,” he said, when they’d reached a point where Leon’s house was visible in the distance. “My car is pretty far away, and broken down. Could I stay with you and your family? I’ll help you watch your siblings, and I can find a job and help you pay bills.”

Leon looked suspicious. “Don’t you have a life to get back to?” he asked. 

Robert shrugged. “I work some dead end job at a temp agency. I don’t have a lot going on. I’d rather stay and help you.”

“Why?” he asked.

And Robert didn’t really know why. “I just. I feel like it’s the right thing to do. I get why you’d be suspicious of a stranger you’ve never met before, but I’ll do whatever I can to show you I just want to help.”

He was confused himself. He had no idea why he was willing to uproot his life for one family, for one teenage boy he’d never met.

But he was, and he just decided to go with it.

Leon’s frown deepened. “I don’t really trust you, but I have to be honest. I really need all the help I can get.”

Robert felt another pang at that. “You deserve the help,” he told the kid. “I’m sorry I can’t do any more.”

Leon laughed humorlessly. “You’ve already done more for me than anyone else I’ve ever met, Robert.”

And if Robert thought his heart had broken before, he had been sorely mistaken.


End file.
